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At XOXO, a Counterculture Kickstarts Itself

Local food carts set up during the XOXO festival in Portland Ore. September 15th.

Photo: Vivian Johnson/Wired

I just got back from four days at the inaugural XOXO conference in Portland, Oregon and it’s hard to know exactly what to say about it.

The conference’s official goal, described on its Kickstarter page, was to “bring together artists and toolmakers to celebrate disruptive creativity.” Attendees also described it to me as an attempt to resurrect the early, less commercial days of the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, Texas; as a chance to check out indie games, movies, and music; to hear from an eclectic group of speakers; or simply to meet or reconnect with interesting people.

All that makes sense. But at the end of its run, XOXO also felt, to me at least, like a defining moment for people who express themselves creatively and independently online, as well as for those who aspire to help them, a moment when that community became aware of itself as a growing, sustainable cultural force, and a moment when it embraced the fact that, unlike in the early days of the web and of the internet, it is now pointedly distinct from the boomtown mentality that seems to characterize so many on the global computer network.

Rex Hammock

/Flickr

Fundraising and financial success were certainly themes of the conference. YouTube’s star ukulele player Julia Nunes, for example, talked about self promotion and about raising money to record independently. And “Indie Game: The Movie,” screened at the XOXO film fest, followed four videogame developers trying to build businesses around their passions.

But in the stories told at XOXO, money was relegated to a supporting – even corrupting – role, a marked contrast with, say, TechCrunch Disrupt, the relentlessly entrepreneurial conference I’d attended earlier the same week. MetaFilter creator Matt Haughey neatly summarized the prevailing ethos in his XOXO presentation when he said “money is the least interesting problem.”

Dan Harmon, creator and former executive producer of the NBC comedy “Community,” went quite a bit further in his well-received keynote address, at one point suggesting building a “scarecrow” to keep clueless money grubbers away from the internet. “You don’t want to monetize the internet,” Harmon said. “You’re having fun now because it can’t be monetized. You’re getting away with murder on it… All the crappy people are back in [the] TV [industry] wasting each other's time.”

"You’re having fun now because your internet content can’t be monetized. You’re getting away with murder." -Dan HarmonEven well-funded technology executives seemed almost apologetic about their businesses. Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson spent much of his presentation explaining why his craft-selling platform didn’t earn a better score in a socially-responsible business certification (lack of diversity) and what it’s been doing to fix the problem (recruiting women into training classes, among other things). Josh Reich, CEO of the banking startup Simple, devoted much of his talk to his history of hacking on audio-video circuitry.

Instead of business models, the talk at XOXO was about DIY creations, cultural mashups, fun hacks, and off-the-wall experiments. Harmon, for example, screened the widely-bootlegged “Heat Vision and Jack,” a goofy pilot he made in the late 1990s to escape his NBC contract, with Jack Black starring as a former astronaut with superpowers and with Owen Wilson supporting as the voice of Black’s motorcycle sidekick.

Indie videogames at XOXO included Nidhogg, a two-player fencing battle played only at festivals, while the musical acts included The Kleptones, a one man audio-video mashup artist.

All told, XOXO included five films, four bands, seven games, 21 speakers, a craft market, and about a half dozen food trucks at any one moment. All were tied together by recurring themes that get to the heart of how the creation and distribution of art, media, and other products are changing:

“Maker” culture. If there was one theme at XOXO, it was DIY – Do It Yourself. Speakers discussed the process of creating their own webcomics, documentaries, dolls, albums, games, and replica movie props. One, MarkerBot co-founder Bre Pettis, gave away two 3-D printers to help attendees bootstrap their own projects.

Attracting a niche audience. If old distribution systems are about promoting media and other products to people through a limited number of gated channels, the new markets are about soft selling to dedicated followers. As Harmon put it, “find your voice, shout it from the rooftops, and keep doing it until the people that are looking for you find you.”

Direct distribution. By and large, participants were bypassing the best established intermediaries for direct sales. Electronica duo The Limousines, for example, publishes music independently after a bad experience with their record label, while “Indie Game: The Movie” is sold as a direct stream.

Kickstarter. Time and again, Kickstarter came up as a key funding source for indie projects, which is probably why co-founder Yancey Strickler was invited to speak.

Maybe four days of XOXO immersion in Portland has given me digital fever dreams. A handful of other participants I contacted were enthusiastic about the conference, but less sweeping about its importance. Rob Lord, a software entrepreneur who in the early 1990s created the Internet Underground Music Archive, called it “a fantastic voyage through [XOXO co-founder] Andy Baio’s daydreams ... of democratizing media and innovation, of unfettering play and creativity.” Culture blogger Scott Beale called it “one of the best conferences I’ve been to in years,” and Pettis of MakerBot said it took him back to “the 2005-2006 online publishing wave.... everyone was sharing and friendly.”

If Disrupt was about being savvy, XOXO was about being naïve. It was about, as Baio put it at one point, “keeping the internet weird.” It turned out there's a lot of enthusiasm for that idea – enough, hopefully, to counterbalance all the frenzied money grubbing going on down in Silicon Valley.

This story has been modified from the original, which misstated the network carrying the comedy television show "Community." Sep. 18 4:45 pm ET